Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, father of the world proletariat, turns 140 today.

To celebrate, historians at his museum in Ulyanovsk — Lenin’s maiden name was Ulyanov and the town where he was born was renamed accordingly upon his death in 1924 — have shown that Lenin was related, Obama-Cheney-style, to the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

With the help of a German retiree (confidence inspiring, isn’t it?), the historians of the Lenin museum were able to trace the Ulyanov line back to the 17th century, when the Bereneses — the predecessors to the Ulyanovs — arrived in Russia and one of them married a proto-Tchaikovsky. Bang.

The historians also found German, Swedish, and Jewish sap in the Ulyanov family tree, which is funny. But what really gets me is that the gay, gay, gay Tchaikovsky is related to a man whose regime criminalized homosexuality.

You wrote:”The historians also found German, Swedish, and Jewish sap in the Ulyanov family tree, which is funny.”

Why is that funny? None of this was previously unknown. Vladimir Ulyanov’s mother’s maiden name was Blank which is a German name and she had Swedish ancestors as well. There are many people of German, Jewish, and Swedish descent in Russia. There was a large population of Germans in the Volga region where Lenin was born. This is neither unusual nor ironic. I was surprised you did not mention that his was also Kalmuk, an people of Asian origins who are Europe’s only indigenous Buddhist population. So what is the big news or humor here?

You also wrote:”But what really gets me is that the gay, gay, gay Tchaikovsky is related to a man whose regime criminalized homosexuality.”

This is not true at all. In Tsarist Russia homosexuality was outlawed but in Soviet Russia under Lenin those laws were overturned and homosexuality was effectively legalized. It is a bit odd but this did not apply to all of the Soviet Union but only to the Russian Federation. Some of the other republics continued to the outlaw homosexuality.

It was Joseph Stalin who criminalized male homosexuality in the 1930’s.

Thank you David. You said exactly what I wanted to say, only better. There was something wrong about Julia’s tone, her irony was misplaced. My own opinion is this: Lenin was completely cosmopolitan, both in his ethnic background and in his internationalist political views. Nor was he a sexual prude. He wrote pamphlets about the liberation of women, and he didn’t care about people’s sexual orientation. Again, that was Stalin. It was Stalin who criminalized homosexuality and also abortion. Stalin, not Lenin. Nobody should confuse those two.